


Anniversary

by steelneena



Series: CR1 Oneshots and Short Series [9]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Glintshore bitches, Memories, Percy's body is a battlefield, de Rolo style weird family bonding, typical percy being percy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24988036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/pseuds/steelneena
Summary: The first thing he sees in the darkness is her face; instantly, it sends his heart spiking, because it’s so similar to the way she used to appear to him, in the darkness of her workshop. Her face is exactly as he last saw it, though lacking the accouterments of battle. She’s lined, her hair showing the first streaks of grey age, her eyes cold gunmetal, lips in a thin line, the corner twitching up as she catches sight of him. Like someone appraising a prize bull that they know will make a rather fine steak.Qed: he's the prize bull on the chopping block.
Relationships: Cassandra de Rolo & Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III & Anna Ripley, Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III/Vex'ahlia
Series: CR1 Oneshots and Short Series [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1412188
Comments: 2
Kudos: 55





	Anniversary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senor_Sparklefingers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senor_Sparklefingers/gifts).



> For Sarah. You told me to write something sad. Idk what this is but here you go I guess.

The first thing he sees in the darkness is her face; instantly, it sends his heart spiking, because it’s so similar to the way she used to appear to him, in the darkness of her workshop. Her face is exactly as he last saw it, though lacking the accouterments of battle. She’s lined, her hair showing the first streaks of grey age, her eyes cold gunmetal, lips in a thin line, the corner twitching up as she catches sight of him. Like someone appraising a prize bull that they know will make a rather fine steak.  
  
Qed: he's the prize bull on the chopping block.

She opens her mouth, lips moving, but words – blessedly – do not come out.

“I forgave you.” He says it like a prayer. “I forgave you, long ago. You have no power over me. Not anymore.”

Masochist that he is, Percy wishes that Vex were there to read her lips, so that she would be able to tell him what was being said. Why he wants to know, he doesn’t really understand. It’s only self-torture, and he’s mostly sworn that off, save the intimate sort in which he engages with Vex from time to time.

“Go away. Let me sleep.”

He closes his eyes, but she’s still there. She’s always there, he supposes, even if he’s fractured her hold on him. She carved away at him, piece by piece, sculpted him into the template for the man he’d become, even if others have added to that mold over the years, generally for the better.

“You are dead and gone. And I am alive.”

Once again, her lips move, but this time he recognizes what’s being said. One, single lowly word.

_“Percival.”_

Her hand reaches out to him, fingers threading into his hair, pushing back his head and baring his throat. There’s no where to run and nothing to do but take it; the darkness consumes all but they two, with no depth and no distance, no height.

Again, _“Percival._ ”

She’s getting nearer now – though her hand hold his head back, she draws in close, as though-

Something hits him in the head and Percy’s eyes fly open to the dimly lit master bedroom. The attacker is Vex’s loosely curled hand.

Out the window, the sun is just barely cresting the treetops, maybe just half past five.

Beneath the covers, beside his wife’s warmth, Percy shivers.

Though the air is chilled, he’s not cold.

The creeping knowledge sinks in. Of why this dream, long since banished. Of why this night.

It’s the Anniversary of Glintshore.

For ages, Percy simply lays there, considering, while Vex mumbles in her sleep, nuzzling close against his side. Absently, Percy strokes the soft skin of her shoulder, all his focus far away. With the other hand, he pushes away the coverlet and sheet, finds slipping down his torso to find the ugly, puckered scars, cylindrical in nature to match the terrible design of his own weapon’s ammunition. They don’t ache, at least not physically, but he feels them deep in his gut all the same.

Some hours later, Vex wakes, giving him a kiss, but he’d noticed her shifting – a tell tale sign of her impending morning groans – and had long since pulled the covers back up, laying his palm open over his stomach instead.

“Good morning dear. You seem pensive.” Nothing gets by his lovely wife. Nothing.

“Woke up early. Mind was elsewhere.” Craning his neck, Percy lands a kiss to her lips. “Now my mind is here. On you.”

“Mmm. It better be.”

At breakfast, only Cassandra glances at him – blessedly, it seems Vex remains ignorant of the current date, even if his little sister is not. But Cassandra, as is typical of character, says nothing about it, simply waiting for him to acknowledge her glance. Once he does, it’s as though everything is normal once again.

The children, of course, are none the wiser. Vesper is busy with her book, which Percy hasn’t the heart to tell her to put away during breakfast, and the twins are preoccupied by feeding one another sausages, much to his mild amusement. So long as there’s no mess, it doesn’t pay to care.

“Maddie, darling, watch your elbow.” Vex’s tone is almost blasé, preoccupied with Juliana.

Life as usual.

Beautiful, messy, and perfect.

It should be so easy to be distracted from his strangely mired thoughts, but it is not. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t dreamed of Ripley in years, and regardless of how long he spends considering, Percy can’t put his finger on why he’s thought of it today.

Especially since Cass has it on her mind, too.

“Papa?” Freddie’s angelic voice chimed in. “Are we still going on our nature walk?”

Their nature walks are a new thing. Usually, Vex is the one teaching their children about nature, but even after all their long years of marriage, Percy still knows the local history of the foliage better than Vex, though not perhaps the common names and properties, or how to use them in the wild. But he does know who planted the poisonous hedges, and on whose grave the particular variety of variegated ivy grows.

“Of course, Freddie.” A little frown takes his lips. “Why wouldn’t we?”

Freddie shrugs. “I dunno. You look like you do when you’re thinking about other things and someone has to remind you what’s going on.”

Out of the mouths of babes…

Vex, predictably, turns her sharp gaze on him, and Percy can feel Cassandra’s subtle glance return to weigh on him. “Darling, is everything alright?”

“I am quite well, dearest.” He is well. Distracted yes, unwell no.

All the same, his wife’s eyes narrow, though she lets it go. At least for now.

Ignoring the implicit _later_ conveyed by her look, Percy turns to his son. “As soon as you’re finished there, if you’re ready.”

“Ready Freddie!” Freddie parrots his Auntie Pike, smile disgustingly, though endearingly, full of sausage. Immediately, his twin contorts her angelic features in a repulsed mask, to which Freddie giggles, of course.

Percy’s heart swells with love, and in that moment at least, his past is prologue, and cannot touch him while their sweet cherub cheeks and subtly pointed ears, dark silken hair and sky blue eyes are all he can see, and the remembered sound of his name on Ripley’s lips is drowned out by the crystal twinkling of their laughter.

It takes significantly less time after that for Freddie to finish his breakfast, though it takes Percy precisely as long as it always does, much to his young son’s consternation. Over the years, he’s grown into a bit of a routine. Likes things ‘just so’. Vex does her best to shake things up on him, and the kids do so naturally, thus creating a balance between perfect mundane habits and unsuspected activity. Any complaints on his part are half-hearted at best. He loves them all far too dearly for it to be anything else. And Vex wouldn’t stand for him to be truly upset at a disruption anyways.

“Come _on_ , Papa!” Freddie’s tugging at his hand, and having stalled long enough, Percy grabs his last tea biscuit and allows his son to pull him along past Cassandra towards the doors to the exterior patio. Only Cassandra’s gaze follows him purposefully as they go.

Later. One way or another, they’ll end up talking.

It happens after the youngest three children are abed. He’s just gotten done pressing soft kisses to Juliana’s feather-soft baby hair, and is gently shutting the door when he notices Cassandra out of the corner of his eye. Vex knows not to expect him to bed until later today, so he simply gives her expectant look a nod, and they walk together in silence to her study.

The moment the door is shut, she – in all her refined gentility – whirls on him. A very placid whirl, but a whirl all the same.

“Tell me.”

Percy walks to the window, staring out into the depth of the night, broken here and there by window glow and torchlight. The moon isn’t visible from this angle of the castle. Clasping his hands behind him, Percy avoids looking at her reflection in the glass before him.

Taking a deep breath, he speaks. “It’s today. Twenty years today.”

“I know.”

There’s no weight, no judgement in her tone.

“Did Vex say anything to you about it?” he asks after a moment’s thick silence.

“No.”

Melancholia settling, Percy wonders if they will ever learn how to talk to one another like normal people, he and his sister.

“And you said nothing to her, of course.”

“Of course.”

His sister is nothing if not decorous.

The room fills with their breath and only the ticking of the little clock he’d made for her desk.

“Percival.” Her voice tremors. It’s something he hasn’t heard in many, many years. “Show me.” Imperious as ever, despite the waver.

At first, he’s confused, almost enough to inquire her to be more specific in her request, but then it hits him, hard.

The thought to protest dissipates before its even fully formed. Though his hands shake, somehow, he manages the buttons on his waistcoat, and the buttons on his shirt. Delicately, he lays his cravat on the windowsill. Half a moment’s contemplation, and he turns. If Percy wracks his brain, really, _really_ hard, he thinks that the last time he was ever bare chested in front of his sister, she was a baby. At least, so far as he knows.

Cassandra, as ever when she wants it to be, is impossible to read.

She steps closer, quick and slow all at the same time. In strange mirror of his morning, her fingers land on the most noticeable scar – the one that had punctured through his gut – pressing lightly, skimming the raised edges.

“Tell me.”

“The killing blow wasn’t Ripley’s.” Her fingers linger. “I don’t know which scar belongs to whose shot. I didn’t care.” Though he waits for her to draw back, she does not. “It didn’t matter. The only shots that mattered were the ones I aimed at her.”

Cassandra’s breath completely stills. “I never saw. Pike removed the bullets before I arrived. You were dressed. There was blood and nothing more than that.”

It’s strange, considering that she’s talking about him during moments for which he has no memories. His brain fills in the blanks, but it will forever be imaginary. For them, it was real. But he only remembers the shadowed talons of Orthax rending through his ethereal soul.

“Part of me has always wondered, what it would look like. How the scars would feel against my fingers… What it would be like to take a bullet myself…”

Only then does Percy pull away, making to do up his shirt again, but his finger and numb and fumbling.

“I don’t know why I dreamed of her today.” His voice lacks emotion, even to his own ears. “After everything we went through, after Vecna, after Vax’ildan…I promised I’d think on better things than my own torment. I only locked her away, it seems. After all these years, perhaps she and I are symbiotic. Perhaps I can only survive because of the terrible lessons my time with her taught me, and so I am not permitted to be free of her.”

“How very self-defeatist. Ironic, considering you’re crediting your torturess with generating your own strength.”

“I am no longer a creature of vengeance, but it does not change the fact that just as the Briarwoods made you, it was Ripley who built me.”

Another long pause, soft silence. “I understand.”

And Percy knows that she speaks the truth.

“Do you dream of them?” It’s bold, perhaps the boldest thing he’s ever asked her. By some miracle, he conjures the strength to turn and face his sister. “As I dream of her?”

“Occasionally. But not for some time.” Cassandra’s hand lingers about the dark line which rings her throat. “There are more important things of which to dream.” With a small smile, Cassandra nods. “Goodnight, Percival. Sleep peacefully, dear brother.”

“And you, sister.”

She leaves first, and he’s alone at the window, though he only lingers long enough for her to make her way to her chambers. Politeness and all that, save for it’s little more than an elaborate rouse to keep himself sequestered there a little longer.

Vex, however, will be waiting, with the soft warmth of her comfort, in their bed. And a good sleep in her embrace is always the most effective balm on his soul.

One last time, Percy glances in the window, sees the ghost of his tormentor’s face veiling his own.

“Goodnight, Anna,” he whispers.

In the reflection, her lips repeat his name with that same, terrible reverence as she hand when they were alone and she wanted him to know just exactly how important his suffering was to her cruel joy.

Head held high, Percy turns his back on her and heads for the hall.

This ghost belongs to him, not the other way around.


End file.
